Posts tagged with: republocrat

If you weren’t able to make it to Derby Station on Wednesday for our latest Acton On Tap event, have no fear: we’re pleased to present the full recording of the evening’s festivities featuring Dr. Carl Trueman of Westminister Seminary via the audio player below.

Dr. Carl Trueman is our guest for Acton on Tap tonight at Derby Station in East Grand Rapids. Be sure to join us and bring a friend if you are within hailing distance of this fine establishment (arrival at 6pm, discussion at 6:30pm).

I have said before that I think that the thesis of Trueman’s book and my own recent work, Ecumenical Babel, are on one level quite complementary. We both see a problem with the politicization of the church’s prophetic voice and social witness. We do differ in the objects of our analysis and therefore in the diagnosis of the problem. Where Dr. Trueman sees conservative cultural and political agendas exerting undue influence on evangelical though in North America, I perceive progressive, even neo-Marxist, ideology at work in the larger mainline ecumenical movement.

So while Dr. Trueman’s point of departure is at some distance from my own, I think our projects in one sense meet in the middle. We are both responding to the phenomenon that Paul Ramsey described in 1967:

…in the United States conservative and liberal religious opinion is the same thing as conservative and liberal secular opinion—with a sharper edge. In short, the polarization of public debate on most issues is simply aided and abetted by the polarization of religious forces.

As for Republocrat, which I reviewed for our own Religion & Liberty, I conclude that Trueman’s “project is not about demonizing capitalism, wealth, or profits on the one hand, or political power on the other. It is about putting the pursuit of profit and power in its proper place.”

Find out more about Republocrat with this video introduction:

Join us tonight if you are able, and if you aren’t we hope to provide some follow-up about the event. My hope is that it will be an example of the kind of principled discussion and vigorous dialogue that should be able to take place between Christians, even on matters as divisive as politics and culture, even in the midst of disagreement.

I recommend the book as a very incisive and insightful challenge to any facile and uncritical identification of the Christian faith with particular political and economic ideologies.

Here’s a snippet of the review:

[Trueman’s] project is not about demonizing capitalism, wealth, or profits one the one hand, or political power on the other. It is about putting the pursuit of profit and power in its proper place. Thus what he writes about the market applies equally well to the government: “no economic system, least of all perhaps capitalism, can long survive without some kind of larger moral underpinning that stands prior to and independent of the kinds of values the market itself generates.” It is in this larger and prior system of belief and action, the Christian faith, that we are to seek our primary identity and unity, and in pursuit of this Trueman’s book is a bracing and worthwhile effort.

I have been saying in various venues for quite some time now that Trueman’s book can be read as a kind of complement to my recent book, Ecumenical Babel: Confusing Economic Ideology and the Church’s Social Witness. But whereas Trueman’s proximate context is the conflation of conservative politics and the Christian faith by evangelicals, my book’s context is the conflation of progressive politics and the Christian faith by mainline ecumenists.

But both books share a basic thesis that, in Trueman’s words, “The gospel cannot and must not be identified with partisan political posturing.”